TO: Jonathan, Marco and Nemo Why are the following freedoms so important to successful, healthy societies?
freedom to influence one's governance, freedom of speech, assembly and belief, freedom to question authority, freedom to pursue one's interests, freedom to reap the fruits of one's efforts and creativity, freedom to learn, freedom to disagree, freedom to establish one's values My thoughts are that these freedoms allow a society to be more adaptive. A social organization is a complex adaptive system, one with differing roles and responsibilities and relationships, and with the necessary distribution and command of power. One major threat to a social system is individuals (or factions) protecting themselves at the expense of other individuals or of the society as a whole. From one perspective, the evolution of modern societies can be summarized as the successive abilities of various cultures to learn how to maximize the freedom and health of society and to minimize this exploitative and destructive tendencies of individuals. Even a casual glance through history shows that the greatest threats to exploitation come from the very leaders of society. The leaders (kings, emperors, tsars, lords, politicians, politburo members) that are so necessary to direct and police society invariably try to use their power to distort their focus from the benefit of society to the benefit of themselves. The freedoms of democracy and free enterprise and the pursuit of knowledge all work to limit the potential for exploitation by leaders and other strong factions of power within society. They remove certain powers from leaders, and they offset other powers with distributed checks and balances. Just as importantly, they empower non-leaders and give everyone the chance to influence their own leadership. (Note that leaders always had these freedoms. The breakthrough was forming a social contract to extend these freedoms as widely as possible.) No society has a model even close to perfect. However, I think successful modern cultures have all tackled these basic issues and found the need to provide these individual freedoms. And social failures have invariably disregarded them. Thoughts? Rog MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
